Skip to content

How to Get Rich on Easy Mode

2026-01-09 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 20:20 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Work and career) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali argues that the easy way to get rich is to help other people make money, and gives four principles for jobs, side hustles and businesses: tie your work to revenue, sell to people who have money, price on value rather than time, and build skills close to the money.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Getting rich on hard mode and on easy mode: help other people make money

  • ★★ Ali says the hard mode society romanticises, such as the struggling artist, handmade candles at a farmer's market or tote bags on Etsy, is a terrible strategy for getting rich. — 00:00:00 · business on easy mode

  • ★★★ Ali's one rule for getting rich on easy mode: help other people make money; anything else is playing on hard mode. — 00:00:29 · business on easy mode

    “You get rich on easy mode when you follow one simple rule, help other people make money.”

00:00:58 — Why helping others get rich is easy mode: the economy as a pyramid, Amazon, Google, Meta and banks

  • ★★ Ali calls the economy functionally a giant pyramid scheme: value is generated at the bottom and captured at the top, so money flows upwards through society. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali says Amazon barely broke even selling cheap things to consumers for most of its existence and makes most of its profits from Amazon Web Services, cloud infrastructure sold to businesses such as Netflix and Disney Plus. — 00:01:41 · Amazon, Netflix
  • ★★ Ali says about 70% of the Fortune 100, the top 100 companies in the US, can be summarised as helping businesses make more money. — 00:02:11
  • ★★ Google and Meta, the company behind Instagram and Facebook, make their money through advertising, Ali says, though people think of them as a search engine and social media platforms. — 00:02:11 · Google, Instagram, Facebook
  • ★★ Ali's business pays Meta $20,000 a month for Instagram ads to sell his courses, only because the ads bring in customers worth more than that spend. — 00:02:40 · Instagram
  • ★ Banks such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs make their money by facilitating transactions for other businesses that help those businesses make money, Ali says. — 00:03:09

00:03:51 — Principle 1: tie your work directly to revenue; the revenue audit and asking for a raise

  • ★★★ Ali's first principle for getting rich on easy mode is to tie your work directly to revenue. — 00:03:51
  • ★★ Ali says an employer pays you only because, somewhere in the chain of logic, you help them make more money than you cost, not for completing tasks, attending meetings or sending emails. — 00:03:51
  • ★★★ If you have a job, Ali's first step to getting rich on easy mode is a revenue audit: ask how your job helps your employer make more money, and whether you can put a number on it. — 00:04:20
  • ★★ A customer support worker is hired not to answer emails and tickets but to prevent customer churn, Ali says, which is revenue retention, a measurable number the CFO cares about. — 00:04:20
  • ★★ Sales jobs tend to be very well paid, Ali says, and salespeople are often paid more than the CEO because they can tie what they do directly to revenue. — 00:04:50
  • ★★★ To get a raise, Ali advises quantifying the value you have generated for the business and will keep generating, and asking to capture a slice of it, rather than citing hard work or inflation. — 00:05:19

00:05:48 — Sponsor read for Stan and its Dare to Dream campaign

00:06:59 — Where the money is: finance, tech, law and consulting partners

  • ★★ Within finance, Ali says, roles close to revenue such as quant traders and front-office investment bankers earn most, while HR, admin and customer support are generally less well paid. — 00:07:45
  • ★★ People in tech make a lot of money, Ali says, because tech companies, including many business-to-business firms like Salesforce that consumers never use, help other people make money. — 00:08:14
  • ★★ Ali says law firm and management consulting partners are paid huge sums for bringing in new clients, their book of business, rather than for being good at law or consulting. — 00:08:43

00:10:11 — Why doctors, teachers and social workers are not the highest paid, and how to reposition teaching skills

  • ★★★ Doctors, teachers and social workers find it hard to get rich because their work is not tied to revenue; Ali calls this a bad system in which market value differs from value to society. — 00:10:11
  • ★★ The doctors who get rich, Ali says, tend to be in the US private healthcare system and to own clinics or hospitals, or to have a highly specialised skill such as neurosurgery that hospitals can bill for. — 00:10:40
  • ★★ Ali says he is not telling people which mode to play; if you want easy mode, you have to tie whatever you do to revenue generation in some way. — 00:11:09
  • ★★ A public school teacher who wants to get rich could move into corporate training, Ali suggests, or use teaching skills as a side hustle to train company staff in something that makes them money. — 00:11:39

00:12:06 — Dan on Ali's team repositions his side hustle as conversion rate optimisation

  • ★★★ Dan, who runs Ali's website, was unsure whether to sell web design, SEO audits or WordPress work as a side hustle; with Ali he concluded his value is raising conversion rates on Ali's sales pages. — 00:12:38
  • ★★ Once Dan pitched his skill as conversion rate optimisation tied to revenue, Ali says, he landed a $15,000 side-hustle client, which he had never managed selling web design, development or SEO audits. — 00:13:05
  • ★★★ Packaging what you sell around helping someone make money, Ali says, lets you play business on easy mode. — 00:13:05 · business on easy mode

00:13:34 — Principle 2: sell to people who have money

  • ★★★ Ali's second principle for getting rich on easy mode is to sell to people who actually have money. — 00:13:34
  • ★★★ If you are trying to get rich, Ali says, selling to businesses is dramatically easier than selling to consumers. — 00:14:06
  • ★★ Businesses buy with spreadsheets and logic and have money to spend, Ali says, while consumers tend to buy with feelings. — 00:14:36
  • ★ Making $100,000 is a lot easier selling 10 things at $10,000 than 10,000 things at $10, Ali says. — 00:14:36
  • ★★★ Ali tells his Lifestyle Business Academy students that an easy first business sells something for between $2,000 and $20,000, so it needs relatively few customers. — 00:14:36 · Lifestyle Business Academy, business on easy mode
  • ★★ An offer like his student Adam's amounts to "I help rich people make more money", Ali says, which is much easier to sell than helping people find their purpose or overcome anxiety or imposter syndrome. — 00:15:19 · imposter syndrome

00:15:47 — Principle 3: charge based on value, not time

  • ★★★ Ali's third principle is to set prices on value rather than time: charging by the hour caps your income at the hours you can work and rewards being slow. — 00:15:47
  • ★★★ Ali's rule of thumb for a business: charge about one tenth of the value you help create, so $10,000 for something that makes a client an extra $100,000. — 00:16:17
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth principle is to build skills that sit close to the money: sales, for example, is a very high-income skill because it is very close to revenue. — 00:16:46

00:16:56 — Principle 4: build skills that sit close to the money

  • ★★ Creative, analytical and content writing tend to be less well paid, Ali says, while the best-paid writers are copywriters who write sales pages. — 00:17:59
  • ★★ The harder it is for an employer or client to draw a line between what you do and the money you make them, Ali says, the harder it is to make a lot of money in that field. — 00:17:59

00:18:23 — Final thoughts: you already help someone make money; make the connection visible

  • ★★ Ali says you are probably already helping someone make money: an employer hires you because you generate more value than they pay you. — 00:18:23
  • ★★ If you already create a lot of value for an employer or client, Ali says, you may only need to make the connection between what you do and how they make money more visible. — 00:18:46
  • ★★★ The key message of Ali's video: getting rich is not really about working harder; the doctors, social workers and teachers he knows work harder than his friends in finance. — 00:19:16
  • ★★★ You could get rich through a job, Ali says, but it is way easier to get rich by having your own business. — 00:19:16

00:20:05 — Pointer to his video on the easiest business to start, sign-off

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Asked how a fitness trainer can help someone earn more, Ali says the richest trainers he knows train entrepreneurs and executives, who can pay high prices because fitness translates into money for their business. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: business on easy mode · revenue audit

Also: People: Dan Rowden

Projects: Lifestyle Business Academy

Organizations: Amazon · Etsy · Facebook · Google · Instagram · Meta · Netflix · NHS · Salesforce · The Walt Disney Company

Concepts: high-income skills · imposter syndrome

Products: Amazon Web Services

Replies to

Replied to by

← Previous: 5 books I'm reading this month · Next → My favourite email app #ad